What TRACE Tells You

General

Discussion

I loved how the class was discussion based, so I never found myself checking out during class because everyone was always engaged.

I think [he] is excellent at his job, but I believe he has unrealistic expectations of his students’ participation. I don’t know how anyone could receive an A as a participation grade, because many who share insightful comments every class often received B’s.

My classes are “active learning” and if you want an A in participation you need to have “impressive” attendance, preparation, and participation.

Syllabus

The strengths of this course are the … syllabus. Everyone is able to get all the information they need…

I do ask that he possibly take a full first day to only work on the syllabus, though. It can get very complex and detailed. Which isn’t a bad thing! Just something to acknowledge and let us slowly acclimate to.

I do present you with a lot of detailed information and expect you to “make it your own.” Learning how to do this will give you a significant competitive advantage.

Slides

the powerpoints are unhelpful: he posts them online, but the powerpoints literally have two words per slide.

This is in accordance with presentation best practices; also, I expect you’ve done the reading and are prepared to discuss and work the material, not transcribe from my slides.

Metacognition

This course was a lot of work but in the best possible way. I hate when a course has a ton of work that seems pointless, but I feel that every assignment, reading, etc. in this course helped me become a better learner and writer.

The only thing I really didn’t like was a self-evaluation … that asked you to evaluate your own participation and name other students who were and weren’t participating enough.

I’m focused on learning and activity; we each have a responsibility to others in the class.

Me

[he] had each student’s best interest at heart, almost more so than any other professor I’ve had. His goal was to help the students become better learners and students and was always providing us with various tools and methods to learn more efficiently and successfully.

[his] greatest strength is his knowledge and enthusiasm… I would like to see more non-verbal engagement. At times it can be tough to read his expressions …

I am geeky: I love to learn and share learning, but I suppose it has its minuses as well!

Digital Communication

Wiki assignments

the wiki assignments were not given with a lot of instruction so we had to learn things on our own which was a little too far to push it.

Yes, I expect you to learn and work outside the classroom and I want to help you do so!

Workload

this course was interesting and challenging, but not accurately labeled in the course catalog… The heavy workload far exceeds a 1000 level rating and was much more work than I expected going into the class.

There are writing assignments, reading responses, each week that are challenging to keep up with because the readings are so long. That being said, these assignments are helpful for learning the material.

This class is a 2000 level class, but it is challenging as well.

Online Communities

Topic

Fascinating course material and discussions… I also enjoyed interacting with real online communities such as Wikipedia. There were a number of different platforms that I hadn’t previously interacted with which were fun to learn the ins and outs of.

He was clearly very knowledgeable …, but I have to admit that I thought the class would be more about popular sites that people use, like Facebook and Instagram.

We will talk about Facebook and Instagram, but as we’ll discuss, these aren’t the best examples of online community. (Facebook, in particular, is more of “communities online” rather than “online community.”)

Workload

I think that at times he underestimated how much work we received from our other three courses (esp since most of us were juniors or higher) and asked too much of us.

This is a challenging course, but is a capstone and most students find it very rewarding.